Bing is safer than Google.com, suggests Google itself!
20 Apr 2016
The Safe Browsing tool by Google is supposed to warn you about sites that might cause harm to your smartphone, tablet or computer. And in a self-critical report, the tool has labelled Google.com as partially dangerous.
The tool browses billions of URLs every day to find ones that might jeopardise your computer's security. It also explains how it might think that the website might be harmful. In this case, Google has marked its own domain harmful by stating that some pages on this site may try and install harmful software on the device they're open on.
While the most recent report was noticed on Tuesday, blog posts from as far back as November point out the same. But Google isn't the only popular site marked with an alarming status. Even Tumblr and Github are marked as not completely safe.
Search engines are our portals to the Internet--it is the tool we use to springboard our way into locating information on the Web.
Very often, the paths that our web crawls traverse can lead through potentially dangerous websites - malicious ones that can potentially harm a computer by installing trojans and malware.
Google's Safe Browsing tool helps safeguard against such scenarios - so when that tool marks google.com itself as a 'potentially dangerous' web location, it is most definitely curious.
The tool, as of Wednesday 20 April, had still marked Google's home page with the message "Some pages on google.com contain deceptive content right now." The details go on to state that "Some pages on this website install malware on visitors' computers" and "Attackers on this site might try to trick you to download software or steal your information (for example passwords, messages, or credit card information.)"
Ominous as this may sound, it may not be such a cause for concern - while google.com may itself not be dangerous, it could well be used as a tool for locating other websites and services that could lead to malicious attacks on a computer.
Other popular websites that are marked as dangerous include popular photo sharing site tumblr.com and coding collaboration site github.com.
In contrast, Google's Safe Site search doesn't list other search engines like Bing.com and duckduckgo.com as dangerous.
